Early in March they had the cable from Howard that Little Nero had been born, that Little Nero’s name was Franklin R. Cornplow, and that ‘mother son self oke’.

So when they came, weary and eyesore and foot-aching, to the Villa Sophie, in April, they were for a certain time glad to feel they had found a new fixed home.

The guests of the Villa were very cosmopolitan, considered Fred and Hazel. They included a Belgian count, a Russian colonel and lady, a professor who, unlike most professors, looked like a professor, a Swedish sculptor who never seemed to do anything to rocks and whose favourite daily joke was that he was there ‘studying villasophie’, a mysterious lady in black who had nothing to recommend her except her mysteriousness, a fat Englishwoman called Lady Jaxon, five respectable but indistinguishable women, and a fat retired Irish contractor from Omaha, also with lady. The contractor was cheery and became Fred’s best friend and worst pest: his wife spoke of art and was studying French — as, suddenly, amazingly, Hazel seemed also to be doing.

In this international musical comedy troupe Hazel could not star as she had on the steamer, but she fitted, she loved their wan references to ancestral wealth; she became smarter and rosier, and daily keener about the pension’s communal sports: meals, swimming, anticipation of meals, boule at the casino, reminiscences about meals, shopping, and picnics with hot meals and bottles of white Bordeaux, on top of Mont Nid . . . Fred noticed that the fat contractor, the fat Lady Jaxon and his own plump self were invariably favoured with the bills for these picnics.

Hazel had first been awed at the be-titled company but within a month she was muttering to Fred, ‘Oh, these are nothing but small-time pension tramps. I’m looking forward to Monte Carlo and Paris, and then our cottage in England. Lady Jaxon — she really is top-drawer — she says we can get a perfectly ducky cottage near her Place in Devon. Would you like that?’

‘Uh — oh yes — sure — I guess so.’

‘Happy?’

‘Oh yes — sure!’

‘Oh, BE happy!’

But daily he felt more out of it, out of everything. In this alien land, with its funny language, nothing, not politics nor business nor manners nor food, was any of his affair. He was an outsider, merely tolerated, and without very definitely longing for home he wanted to be back where he could exercise the citizen’s precious privilege of kicking about the way everybody ran everything.

It seemed to be one of Fred’s typical mornings in this suburb of Samarkand.

He had successfully begged off from a morning’s motor trip to Bandol with Hazel, Lady Jaxon and the contractress. Hazel was so exceptional among American women that she understood that he might, without viciousness or secret plans of dissipation, want to escape so feminized an expedition. She didn’t suspect him of having an engagement with a Provençal enchantress. In this, unfortunately, she was right.